Required Reading: What to give Preston Manning for Christmas
01 November 2005

Preston Manning wants a book for Christmas.  The problem is, the book he wants doesn’t exist – so he’ll be satisfied if someone promises to write it.  What he has requested is a history tracing how contemporary democratic conservatives in Canada came to be, one that recounts the impact of conservative reform movements in this country. 

The book he envisions will be no mere stocking stuffer, no coffee table book that gets admired but otherwise goes unread.  Enjoyable though it may be, it will have a purpose. 

Writing in the Globe and Mail (“Rise and write: The cause needs a new handbook,” 24 October 2005), the former Reform Party/Canadian Alliance Party leader, and now senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, informs us he talks regularly to people – potential candidates for elected office – who don’t appreciate the roots of the movement he once led.  So its time, he thinks, to restate the historical and philosophical underpinnings of this great democratic idea.

It’s not just Preston Manning’s conservative cause that needs a new handbook.  For Canada to have political parties staffed with politicians capable of providing good leadership, and a knowledgeable electorate capable of selecting the best team, we all need to know our history. 

He might have speculated about why the book doesn’t already exist. Why don’t Canadians, by nature, reflect on their intellectual roots?   Why, for example, there has been no “Confederation Generation” to match Joseph Ellis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.  Why neither Maurice Careless’s Brown of the Globe, nor Donald Creighton’s John A. Macdonald, has been bested in fifty years? Yet, in just the last few years Americans have benefited from excellent new books on John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.

New generations of Canadians need, as much as Americans, a refreshed story of how their political parties, and their version of democracy, came to be. But Canadians lack those stories because they’ve been taught – by the virtual omission of history from all levels of the school curriculum – that reflection has little value.  Until historical thinking figures in our everyday lives – until we start nurturing in our school children a sense of this discipline’s strategic importance – Mr. Manning won’t get his wish.

Please send me your comments. RobFerguson@KnowledgeMarketingGroup.com

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